I made it!

Back in March 2009, I decided I’d start tracking my online earnings, and set a goal for where I wanted to be. My gross earnings at the time were about $160 per week with all my sites running off of a shared hosting account. I set my goal to be 40 hours of minimum wage per week (gross). At the time, this made my goal $262 per week, but in July I increased the goal to $290 to match the increase in federal minimum wage. To make sure I didn’t meet my goal thanks to a fluke, I decided that I had to earn this amount 4 weeks in a row.

It’s now 11 months later, and I’ve come a long way. I’ve built several more sites, paid for a major re-design of my largest site, and dropped non-performers. I’ve ditched the shared hosting account for a dedicated server at The Planet (and even had to upgrade to a bigger dedicated server due to increased traffic), and have earned an average of $358 per week over the past 4 weeks. This is $68 per week more than my goal!

My next goal was going to be to net 40 hours of minimum wage (i.e., $290 per week after expenses, such as domain registrations and hosting), but I accidentally hit this goal at the same time as the original goal. Because of this, I’ve decided my new goal is to reach the 50% mark of the $40,000 per year I need to earn in order to quite my day job. This works out to $398.50 per week, averaged over the previous 8 weeks. Not a huge increase, but a nice round percentage that I think I can hit in the near future.